Make a Game You're Confident Players Will Love

Game development is risky - every week hundreds of games are released on Steam. Most fail to sell even a hundred copies, and most studios close after their first release. It doesn't have to be this way. Playtesting & user research offer a structured way to discover if your game is enjoyable & understandable, while you still have time to deal with it. In this talk Steve will discuss how best to prepare for a playtest, and ensure that you're capturing reliable data that inspire game design decisions. Steve is a games user researcher, and work with publishers, platforms and studios of all sizes from indies to AAA to run playtests, and integrate players into the game development process. He's spent over 25,000 hours with players & wrote the bestselling book How To Be A Games User Researcher. Prior to this he was a senior user researcher for PlayStation and worked on many of their top European titles, including Horizon Zero Dawn, SingStar, the LittleBigPlanet series and the PlayStation VR lineup.